The Red Waves and the Shark's Feast

 She had:
            brown skin, tones deeper, richer from her time in the sun, muscles hanging loosely around her bones, “like a sail”, Kapten said;
            thirty-six years of life where she scratched to detach the aril from nutmeg seeds with her bare hands;
            a bounty on her head from the Dutch East-India Trading Company (VOC) for slipping free from her shackles, lubricated with overseer’s Goudzugt blood, diluted from his wine addiction;
            found herself amongst pirates, and decided she would pay off the chirurgeon’s debt of bandages;
            the head of the Komodo dragon where one would expect a human one – the Dutch considered her a monster, or, a specimen for it;
            a voice only she could hear (friendly, a little raspy) independent of her own (callous, sporadic). Orah, the mouth within her mouth.